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Reagan Wortz is a member of The Lincoln Project’s social media team.
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In 2024, the Republican Party made an appeal to masculinity ahead of the election. They marketed themselves as the party of traditional masculinity, going on popular bro podcasts and evoking nostalgia about men who fought in wars and worked in factories for the sake of their obedient wives and Sunday-school-going children.
The GOP used a national conversation about toxic masculinity as an opportunity to paint the left as entirely anti-masculine. The soy beta cuck party, where the values of traditional masculinity are banished.
It worked. Men, and especially young men, swung hard to the right and elected the most obvious conman America has ever seen to the most powerful office in the world. They believed what they were told about masculinity and the way the GOP’s leaders would embrace it.
But since that day, leaders of the right have proven, time and time again, that they lack the very masculinity they celebrated through the campaign.
House Speaker Mike Johnson rolls over on his own long-held principles when asked by the leader. His spine is nowhere to be found. JD Vance and Marco Rubio had no hope of earning their way to the Oval Office, so they’ve leeched onto a man who throws them under the bus whenever convenient. And Pete Hegseth also wakes up every morning, paints on an array of Sephora’s finest cosmetic products, and gets on his knees on national television to fellate a spray-tanned asshole who wouldn’t care if they all dropped dead tomorrow.
There is nothing masculine about what these men are doing. In fact, it is probably the most emasculating thing any of us has ever seen in national politics, and they do it every day.
And then there’s Trump himself. He also slathers on makeup, he dodged the draft, and he even admitted during an NFL broadcast that he never scored a single touchdown in high school football. If there is a war on masculinity, Trump and the men around him are leading that charge.
All of this is a lens through which we can view what we just saw in Minneapolis. Alex Pretti, a VA nurse and an American citizen, was gunned down by ICE agents in the street. It is a harrowing display of what our nation has become, what Trump has turned us into. It is also a clear demonstration of two very different visions of masculinity, which the administration has frantically rushed to label right and left. The fraudulent, angry, boot-licking performance of the right is starkly contrasted by the self-sacrificing, risk-taking bravery of Alex Pretti.
On the right is a group of cowards. Men in masks, hiding from everything around them, unable to restrain a single, skinny lefty without firing their weapons. Powerless men, salivating at the opportunity to exercise State power against fellow citizens. Men who likely never won a fair fight in their lives. Men who had no problem roughing up a woman with a camera but pulled their weapons in fear the second a man stepped in. There is no bravery in their actions, no courage in their existence, and not an ounce of real masculinity hiding within their (mostly obese) bodies.
And you can see on video how they execute that man as he shows them what real masculinity is.
Alex Pretti risked, and received, death in order to protect an unarmed woman from violent thugs. This is traditional masculinity, the kind the right has verbally espoused for decades but can no longer be found in action among its members: the use of one’s strength to protect those who cannot protect themselves. To risk life and limb, in the face of grave danger, in service of an urge to do what is right. To stand alone before men with guns to protect a woman they are hellbent on abusing. It is the stuff of action movies, of knight-in-shining armor fairytales and of epic novels depicting masculine heroes. Alex Pretti believed in something, and he put his body on the line for that belief.
The right as it exists now could not dream of this. The political and cultural figures of the right would never leave their poorly decorated offices and cosplay-oriented podcast studios to risk something real for what they believe. They hold no real principles for which they would fight physically if necessary. Even the violence they fantasize about they outsource to poor Americans easily fooled by a $50,000 signing bonus. And those right-wing nobodies carry out these fantasies in the least masculine way possible: in the anonymity of their masks and their numbers, inflicting harm on vulnerable people and retreating or firing shots the moment they feel the least bit unsafe. They fancy themselves John Wick, but every last one of them is Travis Bickell.
The shooting in Minneapolis is a perfect microcosm of what the right has done to the idea of being a man. They have warped their own brains into believing that cultish, boot-licking obedience to an undeserving man is something to be proud of. They have convinced themselves that using strong words, unaccompanied by action, is enough to make them real men. They have shot down true masculinity in the street and replaced it with the fragility of trigger-happy men who have nothing but hate in their hearts and unsatisfied wives in their beds.
There is a war on masculinity — and Trump is waging it. May every one of his soldiers answer for their crimes.
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